Oh to make the pilgrimage to Pennan, flying in to Aberdeen, recreating the journey a “Local Hero” makes in perhaps the quaintest, cutest film of that golden age of excess, the ’80s.
Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth’s “Gregory’s Girl” announced to the world a great cinema talent with an eye and an ear for “adorable.” But “Local Hero,” a Hollywood studio film (Warner Bros.) with a Hollywood legend (Burt Lancaster) adorning the cast, is where Forsyth best-blended his twee Scots sensibility to a Major Motion Picture.
It’s a classic “fish out of water” comedy, one that flips the conventions of such films, suggesting the predictable, then veering away from it. The ’80s and early ’90s were a golden age for fish out of water comedies, with this film, “The Coca-Cola Kid,” “The Efficiency Expert” and “Crocodile Dundee” among those making their merry way into cinemas around the globe.
Peter Riegert of “Animal House” and later “A Shock to the System” plays a young “acquistitions” closer at Knox Oil & Industries, a Houston concern with an interest in buying “Scotland, or a piece of Scotland” for a North Sea oil storage and shipping terminal.
They’ve settled on tiny Ferness. The aged and eccentric CEO, Mr. Happer (Lancaster), a man working with a shrink who figures humiliating and abusing the born-filthy-rich is a way of “treating” him (Worth a try.), is a bit distracted by to be all-in on this project. But he summons MacIntyre (Riegert), an executive chosen for these “delicate” negotiations because of the surname his Hungarian family took at Ellis Island, and in between getting his name wrong, tells him to “watch the skies” over there.
Happer thinks he’ll make his true mark on the world by getting a comet named for him.
Mac flies over, meets the multi-lingual local Knox company man Oldsen (future Doctor Who Peter Capaldi, barely old enough to shave), sees the scale-model that shows his rapacious company’s plans for buying and destroying Ferness and its bay, and they’re off.
In the grand tradition of city-slicker-goes-rural fish out of water comedies, Mac and Oldsen arrive in the one-phone/one-telephone-box village and never know what hit them.
The hotelier, bartender, taxi driver and only-accountant-in-town Urquhart (Denis Lawson) can barely be bothered to interrupt his lusty attentions to his wife Stella (Jennifer Black) to wait on them. But he, like every other thrifty Scot within earshot, knows exactly why “the Yank” is here.
The only person who doesn’t “know” what Knox Oil has in mind for this town, this beach and this bay is the fetching marine biologist Marina, whose name is so on-the-nose that she simply had to be played by an actress named Jennifer Seagrove.
Oldsen is instantly smitten, and it will take all his professionalism to keep the “secret” to himself. Because the other locals, even the Afro-Scottish priest (Gyearbuor Asante) are already seeing dollar signs, or pound notes, which is one of the points Mac and Gordon Urquhart must haggle over before a price is asked and met.
Meanwhile, the beach that the two gents in three-piece suits keep walking, the cozy pub where the locals gather for sing-alongs and Cèilidh (debates), even the hotel which has no idea what to do with “an electric briefcase” (pre-computer era), but where the three-star chefs (Stella and Gordon) know exactly what to do with an “injured rabbit” Mac brings them (they cook it), start to work on the Yank and his Scots protege.
The clever touches start with the ways Mac’s “bringing the community together to make a collective deal” go wrong for both the Houston hustler and the Ferness finagler Gordon.
One soon-to-be-rich wag is repainting his sailboat and gives it a new name — “The Dollar Bill.”
“Are you sure there are two l’s in ‘dollar’, Gideon?”
“Aye, an’ are there two g’s in ‘bugger off!'”
Writer-director Forsyth sets up characters and love interests that seem destined to derail the deal, and then surprises us when they don’t. He introduces us to the “charms” of the village, while letting us see how “charm” has its limits, and how living in such a place can seem to those stuck there.
The spry-to-the-end Lancaster brings a grand twinkle to the mad Happer, a goof more interested in shooting stars and Northern Lights than in oil.
That reckless motorbiking kid that everybody in the village knows to look out for every time they step out is Ricky, drummer in a local band and played by the “Gregory” of “Gregory’s Girl,” John Gordon Sinclair.
Riegert’s role in all of this is that of the straight man — the reactor — and he handles that with a faintly smarmy ease. He’s enjoyed a long and never-idle career, but his great run was”Animal House” through “Local Hero,” to “Crossing Delancey” and “A Shock to the System,” always great in support, rarely the lead.
Capaldi’s career didn’t truly blow-up until he tore through his profane turn in the wickedly funny political comedy “In the Loop.”
With “Local Hero,” the Oscar-winning legend Lancaster started his career’s home stretch — lots of twinkling old man roles; “Rocket Gibraltar,” “Tough Guys” and “Field of Dreams.”
About the only thing that seems dated in Bill Forsyth’s early films is the juvenile leering and ogling evident in this movie and “Gregory’s Girl,” even hinted at in his male-dominated feature debut, “That Sinking Feeling.” It’s sexist and cringey, seen today.
Our writer-director all but ended his career with “Being Human,” an ambitious and twee Robin Williams misfire that took a lot out of both of them. But he added “Comfort and Joy,” “Housekeeping” and “Breaking In” to a list of movies that suggested producers should have been beating down his door all through the ’90s and beyond.
Scotland had Connery and Lulu and Annie Lennox, The Proclaimers, Billy Connolly, Kelly MacDonald and Craig Ferguson. But nobody in recent years has done “Scotland” better than the guy who put it on the screen at its most adorable, Bill Forsyth.
Rating: PG, innuendo
Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki and Burt Lancaster
Credits: Scripted by directed by Bill Forsyth. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, Youtube, other streaming platforms.
Running time: 1:52
